About

Hey there, I'm Abhay. Welcome to my digital garden! This is a little place for me to jot my thoughts down and share some cool stuff I come across.

I'm a CS sophomore at The University of Texas at Dallas and currently at Dell as a software engineering intern.

Origins

In 9'th grade, I began learning Japanese intensively using the AJATT method. This method relies mainly on consuming native content, but also encourages the use of software to improve the workflow.

I started leveraging tools Anki, a spaced-repetition software, to augment the language acquisition process by cementing vocab in conscious memory before it becomes unconscious memory. I was an avid daily user, but more importantly this was the first tool that really struck a chord in me to think more creatively about software and its applications to life.

The more tools I started getting acquainted with, the more I started to realize the glaring inefficiencies in my workflow. At the time, the one that stuck out like a sore thumb was the painstaking process of converting raw sentences I "mined" from native material into rich Anki flashcards. 1 hour of mindless copypasting every day! This had to change.

This was my doorway into the deep rabbit-hole of programming and open-source. I picked up Python and managed to hack up a CLI script that automated the flashcard creation process. Every time I ran it, my jaw dropped. A few hundred lines of ugly Python code literally just saved 365 hours per year!

Since then, I was absolutely resolved to get better and better at software development to create tools that can directly improve the quality of life of myself and the people around me. In the theme of Japanese-learning, I went on to develop several other projects, including a cross-platform Japanese OCR, Android popup dictionary, Youtube-to-Anki plugin, hard-coded subtitle blocker extension, and many more.

I even completely revamped my first flashcard generator script 3 years later, into a full fledged Rust CLI with dozens of features + Chinese support.

In the end, the heart of my motivation started off and continues to stem from building open-source projects that make life easier.

Technical Interests

But of course, as a hacker I've also developed several technical interests along the way that I'm exploring currently. I strongly believe in the balance of "useful" and "curiosity" projects — the hacker's fulfillment. You can expect a post on this soon!

Lately, distributed systems and scalable architecture has been an exciting topic for me to dive into. The problem of scalability, an inevitable problem for all tech startups, calls for some very clever engineering. The work of open-source organizations like Apache in this space of core infrastructure-level software is fascinating. Contributing to ground-breaking open-source projects like Apache Flink is a strong goal of mine that I'm working towards.

On the other end of the CS world lies deep learning and its applications in NLP and CV. Of course, the world right now is almost revolving around buzzwords like GenAI and LLMs, but there's something about processing massive loads of data into game-changing tools that excites me. There's a beautiful intersection between scalable engineering and machine-learning, which is a topic that I'd love to further dive into.

Coming from working with traditional Japanese-parsing and computer vision libraries, I also naturally felt inclined to further sail the ocean that I only dipped my feet into. You can check out my other website documenting my journey in this quest. It even features a solid roadmap for you to get started in machine learning!

Linux & Self-hosting

Important to note: I use Arch Linux btw. Jokes aside, Linux has seriously changed the way I view computers, and has significantly helped with boosting my productivity. Some software that I use on the desktop includes the bspwm tiling window manager, neovim, tmux, zsh, alacritty, and more. Checkout my dotfiles for my setup.

I love messing around with my homeserver — mainly a Dell PowerEdge R720 running Proxmox. I host several services in LXC containers with Nginx Reverse Proxy, PiHole, and Tailscale as a secure way to remotely access them. It also acts as my NAS, running TrueNAS with Raid-Z2 ZFS setup on some SAS storage. Stay tuned for a post introducing my homelab in-depth!

Outside of CS

Further touching on my language learning origins, I continued to learn Japanese intensively throughout high-school for around 3.5 years to a relatively high level.

During 12'th grade, I started the next chapter in my language learning journey by getting into Mandarin Chinese, and have been learning it (using the same AJATT method) ever-since. While there wasn't a single reason that made me start, the rich history, culture, literature, philosophy, that the language unlocks was definitely appealing.

To avoid becoming glued to the chair, I've been incorporating weight-training and long-distance running into my life, supplemented with a largely whole-foods plant-based diet. I truly believe that one's mental state is directly correlated to one's physical state and that both are need to complete one's life.

You can reach me on Discord @ kamui_ajatt or the following ways: